Mop wringers are used to wring out absorbent, water-saturated mop material. Typically, mop wringers are placed at the top of a water container which is open at the top and holds the cleaning water, or they form a unit with such a container.
The mop to be wrung out is placed from above in an open pressing space between a fixed squeezing plate and a movable squeezing plate. To wring out the mop, the movable squeezing plate is pressed toward the fixed squeezing plate by a swiveling motion of the actuating lever.
In the case of a known mop wringer (disclosed in EP 824 008 A2), the movable squeezing plate is moved horizontally and in parallel.
For this purpose, guideways are provided in the sidewalls of the wringer. The actuating lever is attached on one end to the wringer sidewalls. At a distance from this attachment, a push guide, which is attached to the backside of the moveable squeezing plate, is pivotingly attached to the actuating lever. In response to a swiveling motion of the actuating lever towards the movable squeezing plate, the movable squeezing plate is pushed against the fixed squeezing plate by the push guide, in order to wring out the mop therebetween.
In the case of another mop wringer of the species defined at the outset (DE-GM 94 13 604), the movable squeezing plate performs a pivoting motion. The actuating lever is mounted on the outside of one wringer sidewall and is connected to a rocking shaft which connects both wringer sidewalls. A lever, which is fastened to the rocking shaft between the two wringer sidewalls, is hinged to the push guide, which is engaged with the squeezing plate.
Both known mop wringers have the common feature that in the starting position, the actuating lever slants away from the squeezing plates and is tilted in a vertical position towards the squeezing plates when performing a pressing action. Thus, the actuating force exerted on the actuating lever essentially occurs almost horizontally. In this context, the water container holding the mop wringer must be sufficiently heavy and/or steady to prevent the container from tipping over as a result of this horizontal force. Therefore, such mop wringers can only be placed on water containers which form part of a sufficiently heavy cleaning cart. Thus, such mop wringers are not appropriate for use on light, portable water containers, such as cleaning buckets.
It is also not possible to satisfactorily solve this problem by changing the starting position of the actuating lever, since the actuating lever must be laterally mounted on the outside of the wringer sidewalls as a result of its predefined actuating direction. Every actuating force exerted on the actuating lever is so far off-center in relation to the water container that a tipping force is exerted on the water container.
The object of the present invention is to design a mop wringer in such a way that the actuating force exerted on the actuating lever does not exert any significant tipping force on the water container carrying the mop wringer.